Breaking Gang Violence in Jail with Securus Technologies

I am head of of team of corrections officers at the local prison, and this is a facility where we have a higher concentration of gang members than any other location. Besides keeping the gangs separated in the jail, we have to work proactively to ensure the safety of everyone from officers, visitors, to other inmates. With gang violence on the rise, we have to implement some techniques to stay ahead of the violence or we lose control quickly. It wouldn’t be too difficult for the gangs to overtake officers in jail because they outnumber us so severely, so we have to walk that very fine line each day.

One of the things we have to do each day is getting all types of contraband out of the jail. Inmates have developed ways to get the items they need through the visitor center, and even with detailed body searches, the inmates still get a hold of things like weapons, cellphones, and drugs. Each of these adds an element of danger all there own, something we have worked hard to eradicate at every turn. The top-ranking gang members in jail simply send out the word either in letters or over the phone, and low-level soldiers on the street can not wait to help their brothers by trying to smuggle drugs and weapons in the visitor center. They see this as a badge of honor if they are caught, so we really have things going against us.

Securus Technologies has been instrumental in helping prison systems to keep the inmates under control, and now that our jail had the new inmate communication monitoring system in place, it was time to see it in action. The CEO of Securus Technologies, Richard Smith, says his Dallas-based company and all thousand employees are dedicated to making the world safe for everyone, we were about to see why. This particular system is already in over 2,500 jails around the country, and they must be doing something right because they plan on being in even more this year. Soon as I learned the LBS software, me and my team were eager to see how the results would turn out.

It wasn’t too long before the system alerted my team to drug activity taking place in certain cells, specific soldiers coming in from the streets to being drugs into the visitor center, and even where these gangs were hiding weapons throughout the entire facility to use on unsuspecting inmates. We even discovered information about how the gang members were able to keep the drugs in the jail right under our noses. Through the efforts of Securus Technologies, we have really clamped down on gang violence in the prison.